Barbara Quirk: Reunion trip washed out, but memories will do

Barbara Quirk  —  6/23/2008 5:43 am

God willing and the creek don't rise, we'll be there. Well, I'm uncertain about God's willingness, but for certain, the creek -- and the rivers and the lakes -- did rise to levels that made it seem imprudent to leave home and make the long drive down to southern Indiana for my 50th class reunion from nursing school. As it turned out, it was the right decision, as some roads between here and there were closed and near my old home the Wabash was over its banks. People were being evacuated.

I have a deep and abiding faith that things happen for a reason. Friends nearby needed us and then we took the opportunity to make a leisurely trip to New Glarus, where we had a lovely overnight stay at the Chalet.

I called my former classmate Kay, who had organized the reunion event, and she assured me that there had been several cancellations because of the high water. We went on to have a lengthy phone conversation. We had not seen each other since graduation and her story came tumbling out. Between her and her second husband they had raised 12 children. Then her husband died last year. I had heard that she had lost a college-aged son in a plane crash a number of years ago and it felt good to be able to acknowledge that and express my sympathy for her losses.

Kay has obviously weathered the vicissitudes of life. Listening to her Indiana twang and her memories of those short years we had together, the time and the miles faded and our conversation fell into an easy cadence of stories swapped and memories recalled. In my mind's eye, over the miles of telephone lines, she is still a young woman, walking tall and slim down the aisle with her diploma in her hands and the future in front of her.

No doubt I am the same to her. Fifty years with all of their adventures and passion and ennui were erased for that short time.

This phone encounter and thoughts of my classmates reminded me of a tribute my brother Bob wrote for our brother Tom on Tom's 40th birthday:

Begone, damn age! You and your kind

You leave us often sick and blind

To hell with you! I want for me

To be the kid I used to be

And if I just had me a magic wand

Why, I'd wave it, and break the bond

Of time that holds us fast within

And lets us not choose age, nor kin

But I ain't no king, and I've got no wand

And no magic power to break that bond

So I reckon we must be content

With mem'ries of those years we spent

Well, I guess, maybe, that ain't so wrong

I reckon that's where we belong

In memory we all stay the same

And no one's growin' old or lame

There really ain't no goin' back

No gang down there by the railroad track

Time and Wabash flow right on

And won't return. They're simply gone.

There was the inevitable news of classmates deceased, seven in all of the 33 original graduates. It is hard to imagine that these vibrant, beautiful young women in their starched white uniforms and crisp nurse's caps are gone. They too, in memory, stay the same.

I'm sorry I missed my class reunion, but in a way my remembrances of these friends, these colleagues, remain pure, like a bridal dress folded away between layers of tissue paper, unsullied by the sunshine and grime of life.

Barbara Quirk is a Madison geriatric nurse practitioner.

Barbara Quirk  —  6/23/2008 5:43 am